Doctoral Dissertation Research: Language, Interaction, and Adolescent Socialization.

University Of California-Los Angeles, Los Angeles CA

Investigators

Abstract

The research supported by this award will investigate how ordinary speech interactions with peers and adults at school affect how young people learn to form social alignments, distinguish groups, express emotion, and organize action. The nature of linguistic interactions is known to vary in different institutions of education in ways that reflect the backgrounds of students, material resources, and ideologies of administrators. The researcher will examine this process through an intensive comparative study of everyday language practices in two contrasting institutions of education. The goal of the research is to elucidate how the micro-practices of daily linguistic practice prepare youth for diverse social roles in their post-high school trajectories. The research is important because the linguistic and social competencies that youth learn in school will carry them into adulthood. Findings will help theoreticians better understand the mechanism behind the production of heterogeneous social identities. The research also will support educators and other stakeholders who are concerned to broaden young people's opportunities. The research will be conducted by Tyanna Slobe, a linguistic anthropology doctoral student under the supervision of Dr. Norma Mendoza-Denton at the University of California Los Angeles. The researcher focus on adolescents in two high schools in Santiago, Chile. One is a free public school and the other an expensive private school. The researcher has chosen these research sites because Chile has one of the most segregated systems of education of all developed countries, which makes it feasible to isolate the effects of schooling in a way that would not be possible in a system with more institutional crossover. The researcher will use the intensive methods from linguistic anthropology to collect data on voice and embodied gesture in naturally occurring interactions during classroom and extracurricular activities. Data will be collected through participant observation, interviews, and audiovisual recordings, identifying students at different points in their school careers. She will construct visual representations of pitch tracks, to accompany transcriptions of speech and representations of embodied movement, using a method for visual and textual representation of multimodal semiotic channels in interaction. By comparing interactions in public and private school contexts until graduation, the researcher will be able to explore relationships between small-scale language variation, linguistic practice, institutional organization, and sociopolitical structure. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.